Dubtitling

Dubtitling, is a term that was originally popularized
by anime fans and refers to the intentional replacement or dubbing of the audio
track of an existing video with new and decidedly different commentary with
the goal of creating a completely new meaning or narrative to the original
content. It can also be found in written subtitles that change the meaning and
message of the intact audio portion of a film or television program through
misleading text translations.

The badlipreader (BLR) with over 2 million YouTube subscribers and 220 million viewers has redefined lip reading into a serious art form and most certainly has advanced this playful genre in completely amazing ways. With so many BLR videos to choose, its hard to single out just one or two, but you need to experience LA FWAYthe full BLR version of Beyoncé's live performance at the 2013 Obama Inauguration which is simply EPIC! And if you're a fan, The Walking (And Talking) Dead" — A Bad Lip Reading of The Walking Deadwill make you feel alive again.

Another perfect example is Martin Scorsese’s 1980 movieRaging Bull, pillaged for such dialogue as Robert De Niro’s line, “Did you fuck my wife?” which was married to video footage fromThe Flintstones, SpongeBob SquarePants, and other unexpected performers acting out the scene.

The 1966 comedy What’s
Up, Tiger Lily?was Woody Allen's debut as a film director. Allen’s
work plundered the Japanese spy film Kokusai
himitsu keisatsu: Kagi no kagi (English translation: International
Secret Police: Key of Keys) and dubbed it with new substituted dialogue
that had nothing to do whatsoever with the original plot. By creating new narratives reordering the existing footage, and adding new
dialogue, Allen completely transformed the narrative of the film from
a James Bond–style spy drama into a slapstick comedy about the search for the
world’s best egg-salad recipe.

Replacing a foreign movie’s audio track to produce new
(and typically comedic) meaning has been used in such television shows as Kung Faux and MXC and such movies as Night
of the Day of the Dawn of the Son of the Bride of the Return of the Revenge of
the Terror of the Attack of the Evil, Mutant, Alien, Flesh Eating, Hellbound,
Zombified Living Dead Part 2: In Shocking 2-D,which was a film also famous for having the longest title in movie
history. I’d love to see how Netflix crams that title into its handy pop-up
synopsis box.

Another dubtitle pioneer was Jay Ward who created the 1961 Fractured Flickers, a popular TV show syndicated by the Desilu production company. The twenty-six episodes of Fractured
Flickers were hosted by character actor Hans Conried most famous as the voice ofSnidely Whiplash in the Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoon series. Conried introduced short “flickers” stitched together from old silent films, shorts and various obscure or aging films,
painstakingly dubbed with newly written comic dialogue that was fussily synchronized with the original actors’ lip movements.

Many of the flickers’ dubbed voices were quite familiar to
viewers, since Jay Ward used many of the same voiceover artists from his other
franchise, the perhaps more famous cartoon series Rocky and His Friends, featuring Rocky the squirrel and Bullwinkle
the moose. Regular flicker segments included the Minute Mysteries, starring silent film–era Stan Laurel as the
master detective Sherman Oaks dubbed by a Rocky-esque comedic
voiceover. One notable segment
was Lon Chaney Sr.’s The Hunchback of
Notre Dame remixed as “Dinky Dunstan, Boy Cheerleader." Soon after its airing, Lon Chaney Jr. attempted to sue Jay Ward
but lost. Also notable is a terrific re-editing of Fritz Lang's "M" (Twisted into a skit where Peter Lorre tries to give up smoking).

Many believe that Fractured
Flickers was the original inspiration for Mystery Science Theater 3000 (or more commonly referred to as MST3K), which presented old
(and most notably, bad) “B” movies with a fresh new twist. MST3K fans enjoyed
eleven years and 198 episodes of nonstop potty humor while seated in the back
row of the movie theater on the Satellite of Love (a spaceship) behind the
silhouettes of Commander Joel Robinson and his robots Tom Servo, Crow, Gypsy,
and Cambot. With little or no reverence for the movie playing, the five-man (or,
more specifically, one-man-and-four-robot) crew could be heard chattering over of
some of the worst movies ever made with a running commentary of esoteric
cultural trivia and their signature subversive riffs, which typify culture jamming
at its finest.

One of the most exciting things for me is experiencing all the variations on a theme—or variations on a meme if you will. Famous dubtitling collections on YouTube include some wonderful iterations such as one very specific
sequence of footage featuring Hitler from the 2004 movie Der Untergang (English translation: Downfall).

Recently, many of the over 100 versions of this dubtitling gem have disappeared from
YouTube, thanks to the original movie’s producer and distributor Constantin
Film and YouTube’s automated filtering system called Content ID. The Content ID.
filter allows a copyright owner to halt any video that contains copyrighted
content—whether or not that video meets the test of noninfringing fair use. Content owners can take down an expansive ecosystem of bonafied rights violations as well as more innocent editorial, de minimis and/or fair-use memes with the simple
flick of a switch.

Electronic Frontier Foundation board member, entrepreneur,
and technologist Brad Templeton got in the action, creating a hilarious version
with Hitler ranting about digital rights and the failure of Digital
Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedowns to illustrate the fair use
clause. Although Templeton went to great lengths to meet the
strict requirements for fair use by limiting the content to critique about Constantin
Films and the issues surrounding the clip, his version was also taken down.
More about the DMCA and copyright issues can be found in my Miximalism Blog.

As per Templeton's technical definition of fair use, another popular meme on YouTube is the phenomenon known as
literal video. The goal is to locate the worst possible music video (typically
from the 1980s, for some reason) that includes as many odd visual moments as
possible. Using a karaoke music track (no vocals) of the same song, the
miximalist writes and performs new song lyrics that (and this is important)
specifically refer to the visuals found in the original music video. The
original video and the new audio are combined to create an updated literal video.

There is a wide variety to see such as Billy
Idol’s White Wedding and Take on Me, a song by Norwegian pop band a-ha
await your critique. By far, the best literal video is the 1980s Bonnie Tyler
hit Total Eclipse of the Heart as literalized by David A. Scott. After only
five million views, the literal video was pulled down by
YouTube when EMI Music Publishing Limited complained. YouTube fans were
outraged, and stories about the censorship abounded on national media,
including Fox TV’s Good Day LA, ABC’s
Nightline, CNN’s iReport, and others. EMI and YouTube quickly relented; the clip was
reinstated, and literal videos are now well ensconced as another elemental
resource within the YouTubian experience.

While perhaps not a specific form of dubtitling, thanks to the technology
of multitrack interactivity, we can now rediscover the old movie classics, such
as Casablanca, with the reissued DVD director’s
commentary audio-overlay track blabbering away over our favorite cinematic
jewels. Interviews and narration babble atop Bogie and Bergman with a new
dimension of interest, trivia, and insight—pausing only here and there to allow
the classic one-liners to shine through.